Newsrooms should not spin up instances for their reporters partially because this is too new to dedicate strapped staff to, partially because layoffs mean reporters would lose their timelines bc you can't migrate posts, partially because newsrooms are *already* not great at social media policies, and mostly because the problem it ostensibly solves, verification, can be done by just sticking rel=me into author pages and letting reporters self-verify super easily wherever they set up shop here.

Since this is getting some traction, I'll append with two additional thoughts:

I actually *do* think news orgs should spin up an instance for themselves, because [email protected] looks goofy, but reporters should set up where they want.

And "where they want" shouldn't probably all be on the same server bc that becomes a real tempting honeypot for defederation battles.

@dansinker I've been suggesting to my company to do the same. I mean, we've already got a .cloud domain, why not a .social one? Then we can FINALLY ABANDON THE HALF DOZEN TERRIBLE SOLUTIONS WE'VE TRIED SO FAR.

"Updates from your company!" are the worst e-mails I receive. at least Mastodon lets me filter by content language. (We're a very French org.)

Link-based verification is "okay" (for those technically inclined to check it), but alice@<company>.social is rather harder to spoof!